GLI3 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: To explore possible molecular events implicated in SLC2A1-AS1 high expression in ESCC, UCSC Genome Browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu/) was used to obtain the promoter sequence of SLC2A1-AS1, hTFtarget and JASPAR online software was used to predict the binding site of transcription factors, we found that transcriptional factor GLI3 bound to three potential sites in SLC2A1-AS1 promoter region (Fig. 2A).